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February 05, 2004

Chacun a son gout (Updated: Chacun à son goût)

(...or, how many more accented characters that I don't know how to reproduce in Movable Type can I use on this blog? Just wait for my post on Roseraie de l'Hay; quick: which letter has the umlaut?)

"Sonnet: Daffodils" by Gavin Ewart was the featured poem on today's radio broadcast of A Writer's Almanac (to get to the poem, you'll need to scroll down to February 5).

I'm ambivalent about this poem. There's nothing incorrect about what the poet says about daffodils here, yet the tone puts me off a bit: a bit too arch, yet at the same time a bit too blasé*. Ah, well. As one who's stone in love with Henry Mitchell, that great lover of daffodils, I guess it's hard for me to warm up to an opinion about daffodils that's anything short of intensely felt. This poem...well, it's almost like hearing a stranger talk dismissively about a good friend behind her back.

Which is not to say that the daffodil should be everyone's favorite flower. This reaction by Jamaica Kincaid (from My Garden (Book), pub. info. here) is an honest feeling, honestly expressed:

I do not like daffodils, but that's a legacy of the gun-to-the-head approach, for I was forced to memorize the poem by William Wordsworth when I was a child.

Nor should daffodils be merely a saccharine symbol of spring. A.E. Housman gives us his take in "The Lent Lily", sobering as it is ("And there’s the Lenten lily / That has not long to stay / And dies on Easter day."), and well worth reading.

So if, as the poem of the day puts it,

The Spring too (teenagers witness) has its own kind of
boredom.

well, then, all I can say is...lay some boredom on me.

*Accent aigu shamelessly purloined from Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening, who was kind enough to leave it in a comment to an earlier post.

Comments

Great tip - it works! "Chacun à son goût". Even got that funky umlauted ÿ for "Roseraie de l'Haÿ". (Interesting that this doesn't work with inserted "multinational" characters from Word...further evidence of the inherent superiority of WordPerfect...but I digress.) Thank you thank you!

I have just started reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, which is about competitive Scrabble. One of the players is described as wearing a t-shirt that says, "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" I think I would improve that t-shirt by putting "God is in the details" on the front and the hyphen question on the back. I didn't even realize that rose bush had an umlaut because I have seen it without more than with.

Print me up one of them t-shirts, 'cause it's singing my tune. You're right--frequently the umlaut is omitted altogether, and often when the umlaut is used, it's used on the wrong vowel (the a instead of the y). Not that I'm anal-retentive about it or anything.
: D

I knew about that, too--sorry I didn't think to mention it. You can get to it (in Win98) by Start menu > Programs > Accessories > System tools. Alicia's way is faster. But I use Character Map all the time in MasterCook to get the degree symbol, so I put it on my Quick Launch toolbar where it's handy. It also helps to know what font you're typing in.

I love it! "Learning through blogging." Interestingly, the character map terms the ÿ character "Latin small letter y with diaeresis"--which definitely describes it better than "umlauted". So many words, so little brain capacity!